Vile Villain Saccharine Show / Western Animation

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Vile Villains in Saccharine Shows in Western Animation.

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• The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin has Quellor, the Supreme Oppressor of M.A.V.O., the Monsters And Villains Organization, who gives off a very ominous vibe.
• Adventure Time is more crapsaccharine than saccharine (though the characters inside don't seem to care), but some villains are a cut above the rest:
  • Hunson Abadeer is the soul-sucking Lord of Evil, who rules the Nightosphere (which is Hell) and has a One-Winged Angel form Lovecraft would have been proud of. He does genuinely love his daughter Marceline, but the way he expresses his love is twisted at best.
  • The Lich seeks to eradicate all life, kills things simply by being near them, looks like a half-rotten corpse, his possession of Bubblegum is straight out of The Exorcist, he kills Billy and uses him as Living Bodysuit, kills Prismo, is a master of manipulation and Mind Rape, and he's voiced by Ron Perlman. He's the only villain in the entire series that is played dead seriously (pun intended), and he is all the more terrifying for it. It's implied he's the embodiment of the first bomb of the Mushroom War, making him the avatar of the apocalypse. And it turns out he's merely a disciple of someone FAR, FAR worse.
  • The Fight King, who tricked friend warriors into fighting his Gladiator Ghosts, and then eventually forced them to fight and kill each other for his own amusement. Just like The Lich, he is a completely serious villain without any comical trait.
  • Me-Mow threatens to kill Jake if he doesn't assassinate Wildberry Princess for her, and at one point injects him with half the poison. Once she's discovered she tries to blind Finn with a knife.
  • The Destiny Gang are a band of marauding thugs that terrorise and plunder a village, burn it down purely out of spite, then set Finn's house on fire while his family are still inside (including his infant sibling). The two-part episode in which they appear features The Lich and finally confirms that Ooo is set After the End, and they are still one of the darkest things about the episode.
  • Dr. Gross, a Mad Scientist who brainwashed children into becoming her "seekers" and accidentally unleashed a virus that killed two-thirds of humans on the islands, feeling no remorse for her actions. In the present, she continued her experiments and tried to cut apart the heroes and use them as raw material.
  • Ricardio is not only a blood covered giant organ with a scary looking face and hideous biomechanical limbs, he's also the closest thing to a rapist they could get away with having in a kid's show.
  • Much like The Lich, GOLB truly stands out as a disturbingly horrific villain without comedic moments. He is an Eldritch Abomination and an Omnicidal Maniac played seriously.
• While Aladdin: The Series is usually even more light-hearted and silly than the movie (which was already funny, but not necessarily silly), with even the villains mostly being Played for Laughs, Mozenrath is the exception. He's an Evil Sorcerer trying to rule the world and has done such things as enslave the Sprites to find a powerful artifact, brainwash Aladdin's friends into helping him, turn the Sultan of Agrabah into a statue, increase his powers by having a crystal suck Genie's powers, and in his final episode try to solve his Cast From Hitpoints dilemma by swapping bodies with Aladdin. Mirage the cat witch is a lesser example; she is the universe's official "Evil Incarnate" and usually gets pretty far in her plans, but sometimes it seems that the heroes don't have to work as hard to stop her as they do Mozenrath.
• Amphibia:
  • King Andrias, the thought to be good king in Season 2, turns out to be the Big Bad, who comes from a long line of galactic conquerors who wants to take over all dimensions, including Anne's. And as if seeing Anne has the only one left with the power to defeat him wasn't enough, he will stop at nothing to kill her.
  • The Cloak-Bot from the beginning of Season 3 takes this up several notches. Unlike the past minor antagonists, this one is a Killer Robot who can actually destroy or terminate anything in its path in just a second. And unlike Anne's battles with other villains up to now, her fights with the Cloak-Bot almost culminated with it nearly killing her without her parents even knowing.
  • The Core seems to take this to even higher levels — being a Mind Hive of Amphibia's greatest minds who demands a human host. It craves Marcy due to her intelligence, as well as being the only one to defeat Andrias at Flipwart, and thus takes control of her.
• Supreme Dog from Arthur is a rather dark villain for a show aimed at young children. He gave children candy bars that were designed to get them hooked, and since he refused to eat one when asked, it is rather implied that they contained rather nasty ingredients. Thankfully, he was eventually arrested and his business was shut down.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold has Starro, a giant space starfish of unknown origin complete with a menacing voice, tiny minions that latch onto your face and turn you into a slave, and one cold, unblinking eye. As a bonus, he feeds on the life force of the inhabitants of each planet he invades. Any planet he can't enslave or devour, he destroys. His henchman Chun Yull is even worse, a man who sold out his entire planet.
  • There was also the Psycho-Pirate from “Inside the Outsiders”, an Emotion Eater who captured the teenage protagonists for sustenance. He also appears in the tie-in comic, where he almost mind controls Tawky Tawny into killing Billy Batson.
  • Darkseid only appears in one episode with his general Take Over the World shtick, but he's notable that he's played straight, without any of the foibles that other villains get.
• Ben 10, especially the original series, is goofy with a Silver Age feeling to it, yet even some of its one-shot villains are outright disturbing. (With the exception of Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, which both have creepy sinister villains but are already dark to begin with.)
  • Vilgax is a Galactic Conqueror stated to be the most feared being in the Universe, who wants get the Omnitrix so he can use it to create an army of invincible shapeshifting drones. He is explicitly stated to have blown up at least one inhabited planet according to flashbacks, almost exterminating the species in the process, and Word of God implied it wasn't the only one. When first meeting with Ben, he delivers him a very brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, kidnaps him by taking his relatives hostage, and tries to cut his arm off just so he can take the Omnitrix from it.
    • When Vilgax appears in the Lighter and Softer reboot series, he fills this trope even more. While up to that point the reboot has been much more light-hearted and funny than the previous series, much like Teen Titans Go! and The Powerpuff Girls (2016), Vilgax's character has scarcely changed at all. He's still a ruthless, power-hungry conqueror, and the tone of the series makes him stand out even more.
  • Zombozo is a Monster Clown Humanoid Abomination with a really creepy design, prone for Slasher Smiles, who fuels his power by harvesting happiness (Fear in Omniverse) from people. Prolonged drain can result in people being reduced to weak, barely alive husks, and he apparently enjoys abducting children to drain them more later. When Ben confronts him, he proceeds to disturb and psychologically torture the kid thanks to weird illusions involving a huge deal of Alien Geometry. And that guy is a minor villain.
  • Ghostfreak/Zs'Skayr initially is introduced as one of Ben's ten original form in the Omnitrix, and one that disturbs him so much he is reluctant to use it. Then it turns out his memory is still contained inside the Omnitrix along with his DNA, allowing him to resurrect from Ben's transformation, and he just happens to be a maniac who wants to take Ben's body and use it to his own ends. His schemes involves, amongst other things, covering the world with Darkness while mutating the entire population into hideous monsters. And as long as the Omnitrix contains his DNA, he can always come back from the grave.
  • Khyber the Huntsman, who was The Heavy in season 1 of Ben 10: Omniverse, is a Predator-esque Egomaniac Hunter who likes to hunt various species in the Galaxy and collect their bodyparts as trophies. He doesn't care if the species he hunts are sentient, and judging by what we see in his ship's Trophy Room, he did slay several sentient aliens before coming for Ben, making him a Serial Killer as well. Oh, and he owns the Nemetrix, an Omnitrix Evil Knockoff allowing his hound to shapeshift into all kind of feral alien predators.
  • Malware, the true Big Bad of season 1 and Khyber's boss, is a psychopathic Galvanic Mechamorph born with a malfunction forcing him to sustain himself by cannibalizing people of his own species in exchange of the ability to copy technology by consuming it. His onscreen actions include trying to crash a school bus just to distract Ben, mentally scarring Ben as a child by destroying one of his alien forms, and in the finale blowing up his own homeworld. He especially stands out as this trope amongst Ben 10 villains, because, despite being in the most goofy and light-hearted entry in the franchise, his viciousness and cruelty rivals some of Alien Force's and Ultimate Alien's Big Bads.
• Big City Greens: Chip Whistler, while still comedic, his obsession with driving the Greens out of Big City would lead him to gradually become more of a threat to the family than the typical jerk antagonists usually found in the show; culminating in him straight-up attempting to kill Cricket.
• The 2017 Bob the Builder Movie Called "The Mega Machines" had Conrad, who started a flood so he could ruin Bob's good name and threatens to scrap his machines if they don't do his bidding.
• Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!: Toadborg, in contrast to his comical, ineffectual minions, is a powerful, cold, calculating and competent threat the show always treated seriously.
• Buzz Lightyear of Star Command:
  • NOS-4-A2 stood out as a villain who was taken more seriously and was generally more of a threat than Zurg or the rest of the rogues gallery (although he still had the occassional comedic moment or mild humiliation). Episodes featuring him tend to be Darker and Edgier in tone, such as when he was terrorising a world full of robots and killed a girl's robotic surrogate parents, or when he turned Ty Parsec into Wirewolf. To really hit this home, in his final appearance, he formed a team-up with XL and almost effortlessly took over Zurg's home world, turned the galaxy into machines existing only as his food source, and raised the stakes so high that it caused XL to have a Heel–Face Turn. He was also the only villain to be Killed Off for Real, mainly because he was too big a threat to be left alive.
  • Evil Buzz, too, at least at first. In his initial appearance, he is an incredibly sinister threat, with very practical if ruthless methods of villainy compared to Zurg's antics. He even successfully conquered his home universe thanks to his competence, as well as his methods of subjugation and genocide. When he is eventually defeated by Buzz, he opts to stay behind in his ship to die rather than surrender, and even then he still survives. Downplayed in his second appearance, however. While he's still a credible threat, his level of seriousness is toned down thanks to his sickening romantic interactions with Gravatina. Although when push come to shove, he still quite harshly leaves her to die when the ship they're in is about to explode, so even then he was still quite the evil-doer.
• Camp Lazlo: Meatman from the episode of the same name is much more intimidating and terrifying than you'd expect from a lighthearted show like this, being a monster who wants to eat the jellybeans.
  Lazlo: Please, Meatman! I'm sorry I called you stinky, smelly, and stupid!
  Meatman: But that's how I like my dinner. Stinky... smelly... and STUPID!
• Care Bears, of all franchises, tends to have this in spades, what with Professor Coldheart, the Spirit in the Book, Dark Heart, No-Heart and others all dedicated to the removal of any ability to feel emotion. Appropriately, Professor Coldheart has the (relatively) lightest/softest/most saccharine look, but the resemblance of his tactics to those often used by pedophiles could be said to make him simultaneously the creepiest.
• Centaurworld: After a season spent exploring the colorful, cartoonish Centaurworld and its comical and eccentric inhabitants, the season 1 finale introduces the Nowhere King, a monstrous being made of Ominous Obsidian Ooze with a deer skull for a head. He is the master of the minotaur armies threatening Horse and Rider's world and is intent on conquering both Centaurworld and the human world.
• ChalkZone: Pretty much every villain due to the show being sweeter than most of its Nickelodeon ilk. These ones stand out in particular.
  • Skrawl, a malformed zoner, who loathed Rudy for the mistaken belief that he was directly responsible for making him the misshapen being he is (It was really a bunch of kids messing with the drawing that made Skrawl whatever he is). Almost any episode with Skrawl in it is not Played for Laughs with his deeds including imprisoning Rudy and various innocents to throw into the ocean, convincing Penny to join him as future co-ruler of ChalkZone, creating a gigantic sentient brain to mind control everyone in ChalkZone, and teaming up with the robot zoner Craniac to create a robot doppelganger of Rudy to destroy magic chalk.
  • Terri O'Bouffant and Vinnie Raton. The former was a news reporter and the latter was a businessman, but both intended on proving ChalkZone existed for the sole purpose of making millions of a world made of chalk with Terri going as far as to stalk Rudy and Penny (10-year old children!) to collect evidence. Even Vinnie was shocked.
  • The Quicksand Man. This one-time villain was a demonic being who mysteriously appeared in NightZone. He created magical sand that put people to sleep and sucked them into a sand-filled world where they were harassed by their worst nightmares. Not a funny character at all.
  • The Red Chalk was a piece of magical red chalk like the white one Rudy had. Unlike Rudy's chalk, anything it drew became evil. A chicken would become a fire-breathing monster, a baseball bat would become animate and attack bystanders, a garbage truck would launch living garbage at people, etc. The worst part was that the moment it was used, it could not be removed from the hand in any way unless the bearer exited ChalkZone where its power would become useless, though it still had enough self-awareness to move itself into a place where an unsuspecting person would find it and become its next wielder.
  • Word of God has stated that if the show had lasted longer, it would have introduced a team-up between Skrawl and a human who had transformed into a zoner from spending too long in ChalkZone. It was apparently intended to be a story arc for the show, and considering how much time Rudy has spent in ChalkZone, a Wham Episode would not have been out of place for the story.
• The Classic Disney Shorts have The Mad Doctor, who is an evil doctor bent on cutting up Mickey's dog Pluto as part of a lab experiment. Later, he actually threatens to cut open Mickey Mouse himself! Fortunately, he only exists in one of Mickey's nightmares.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • Father is a shadowy figure with control over fire, who brainwashed five children into thinking they were his/being evil. He is always beaten by the skin of everyone else's teeth and you've got a very threatening villain for such a harmless show.
  • Once Father went through massive Villain Decay, The Movie gave us Grandfather, Father's father (and Numbuh Zero's), who possesses many of Father's abilities as well as the ability to turn all the people in the world into undead senior citizens.
• XANA from Code Lyoko. The show takes place in a boarding school that appears to be a rather light-hearted, comical setting, with a ridiculous gym teacher, a Lovable Alpha Bitch and characters making jokes, but as soon as XANA starts acting, we suddenly get stuff such as Killer Wasps/Rats/Birds invasions, Giant Destructive Teddy Bears, place where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, Zombie Apocalypse, cataclysms, Demonic Possession, and the list goes on. And just in case this wasn't scary enough, XANA itself never appears in person.
• Kilobot from Cubix: Robots for Everyone qualifies. Cubix had always been a rather lighthearted show, with most of its villains being rather goofy. Even Dr. K, the main villain, had a backstory and reasons for becoming evil. Most of his robots were either mute or spoke in incomplete sentences in the third person, acting only on him. But Kilobot took everything to a whole new level. He actively betrayed Dr. K to break into RobixCorp to steal a cloning device and attempted to frame Maximix for it, threatened to destroy RobixCorp if Nemo didn't let him have it, sent an army of Zombots after RobixCorp and nearly killed Maximix and Cubix in cold blood... and after the latter was revived, tried to kill him again in cold blood, by reaching into his chest and crushing his EPU with his bare hands.
• Danny Phantom has many villains that, while powerful and dangerous, have many Affably Evil moments and still have standards, such as not fighting or harming humans during Christmas. "The Ultimate Enemy" features Danny's future self, Dark Danny. His attempts to act nice are obviously fake, and all of the destruction and death he's responsible for is played seriously.
• Darkwing Duck is a show where most of the villains are Laughably Evil and overly arrogant. Even the Devil (who's a loser) has comedy value. However, that didn't stop the writers from creating a couple genuinely scary villains.
  • Taurus Bulba. While the other villains are comical and over-the-top, Bulba is a crime boss who rarely acts comical or over-the-top. Not only did he kill Gosalyn's grandfather, but also when he was trying to get the code for the Waddlemeyer Ramrod, threatened to drop Gosalyn off a building, just to blackmail Darkwing Duck for a passcode. And after he got it he still tried to kill her onscreen anyway! The best part is that he's the very first villain to ever appear in the show. He was presumably killed in the explosion that destroyed the weapon, but Steelbeak and FOWL later brought him back to life as a near-indestructible cyborg, assuming he would accept their offer of employment. They were wrong. He not only turned it down, he destroyed the place in a rage, calling them out for "forgetting small details, like... asking my permission". All played completely seriously.
  • Darkwarrior Duck, who's an alternative futuristic version of Darkwing Duck who has gone insane and overzealous on crime, to the point that even jaywalkers and curfew breakers are brutally beaten and jailed for very long terms. This is not played for laughs. He apparently even killed his Negaduck at some time just to prove who was in charge.
  • And Negaduck (Darkwing Duck's own Evil Counterpart) is a sort of unusual case. Usually he's so over-the-top violent and psychotic it's hilarious. However, he sometimes decides to pull a villainous version of Let's Get Dangerous! (fitting, since Darkwing himself is the Trope Namer). When he does this, he stops being funny and becomes scary.
• Dora the Explorer normally only has Swiper, but some of the Big Bads in the double-length specials qualify — especially the Witch from "Dora's Fairy Tale Adventure", who put Boots in a never ending sleep For the Evulz and was genuinely evil.
• Dragons: Riders of Berk is a fairly light hearted and optimistic show, and most of the villains are either misunderstood (if dragons) or redeemable (if human). It also has a few truly dark villains.
  • Dagur the Deranged, the first villain who is presented without any redeeming features whatsoever. In his earlier appearances, he's a Laughing Mad Axe-Crazy Blood Knight with Chronic Back Stabbing Disorder who repeatedly heavily implies that he killed his pacifistic father, Oswald the Agreeable, as well as being enough of a badass to hold his own against Alvin (who, in turn can match Stoick the Vast in combat) for a while. As of Race to the Edge, he's toughened up, swapping the last of his Dirty Coward tendencies for even greater psychosis (he's mentioned to have destroyed Heather's village, killing her adopted parents) and a fairly impressive beard. Oh, and he's got a serious thing for Hiccup. Comparisons with the Joker have been made, and with good reason. Until his Heel–Face Turn revealed much of that was exaggerated, anyway.
  • Viggo Grimborn is even worse, being a ruthless chessmaster who created many elaborate plans that were all taken completely seriously. He's also a genocidal Dragon Hunter who was willing to have his own men executed , spread the Scourge of Odin just to get rich off a cure, and starve Berk just to hurt the Dragon Riders. Eventually, however, he does make a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Viggo's brother, Ryker, started out as simply the second in command of the Dragon Hunters who went along with Viggo's plans. He became this after betraying his brother and attempting to use the Shellfire to wipe out every island in the Archipelago, explicitly stating that he didn't want prisoners, but instead to kill everyone. His actions led to multiple islands and villages being devastated and hundreds of civilians being endangered.
  • Krogan, Drago Bludvist's second in command, established himself as one of the Big Bads of the final seasons by brutally attacking Garff and leaving him to die and killing one of his hunters with an axe for questioning his methods of trapping dragons. He was then shown sacrificing dozens of his men for his goal and was treated as a serious threat to Berk and several other islands.
  • "Trader" Johann, the true leader of the Dragon Hunters, is also taken quite seriously. He's revealed to be an extremely manipulative sociopath who was explicitly stated to have murdered quite a few merchants before stealing most of the stories he told from them. His actions led to some of the darkest moments in the series, such as Viggo's Heroic Sacrifice and Stoick being gravely injured by his men. He also took the war across the entire archipelago, and even beyond it since his Flyers attacked Vanaheim, nearly killing the Sentinels guarding it. And unlike Dagur and Viggo, he was never redeemed.
• Dragon Tales: For such a saccharine show, Cyrus The Slinky Serpent is very creepy and ominous looking. He isn't the most evil character on this list, but the implication he's an ovivore is somewhat disturbing...
• Zordrak of The Dreamstone. A gargantuan bellowing Eldritch Abomination with a serious Hair-Trigger Temper that frequently abuses or even exterminates his Slave Mooks the Urpneys for the slightest irritance. While also managing to be rather funny, he's a pretty creepy guy, even when not compared to the cutesy residents of the Land Of Dreams.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy is a Sadist Show, but everything that happens to the Eds up until the Grand Finale television movie is played for laughs and could be considered lighthearted enough. The end of Big Picture Show introduces Eddy's brother, whose abusive behavior towards Eddy is actually played straight, with the rest of the cast being horrified by the beatdown.
• From the same creator of Sofia the First, we have Elena of Avalor and its main villain Shuriki. Put simply, she's the first villain to commit onscreen murder of the protagonist's parents. She just gets much more vile and cruel from here. Let us repeat that this is a Disney Junior show.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Miss Doombringer, unlike Crocker, desires to find Fairies not to prove to everyone that they exist or to conquer the world; she's just Ax-Crazy and wants to tear the wings off of Fairies to mount on her wall!
  • The Destructinator from the Wishology trilogy. An Omnicidal Maniac dedicated to the destruction of other worlds and willing to kill a 10 year old boy. He is so atrocious he was the first and only character in the series to be Killed Off for Real.
• The short-lived animated series Family Dog was mostly a lighthearted series about a dog and the dysfunctional family he lived with, but the episode "Dog Days of Summer" introduced a trio of callous teens and their vicious dog that nearly killed the titular family dog.
• While Family Guy is a show filled with Comedic Sociopathy, most of the villains are Played for Laughs. However, there have been a few who've been played as genuine threats with no humorous moments to undermine them:
  • Diane Simmons, who was a secondary character for most of the show's run, is revealed to be a psychotic killer in “And Then There Were Fewer.” She murders several of the show's recurring characters and attempts to frame her colleague Tom Tucker for it, all because Tom had succeeded in getting her replaced behind the news desk. When Lois realizes what Diane has done, Diane very nearly kills her too, only being stopped because Stewie didn’t want anyone but him killing Lois.
  • Jeffrey Fecalman is the abusive boyfriend of Quagmire's sister Brenda. He mercilessly beats her constantly, and when Peter, Joe, and Quagmire take Jeff into the woods in an attempt to kill him in a Hunting "Accident", he turns the tables on them. His attempted murder of Quagmire is particularly brutal, as he chokes him seemingly to death with a Slasher Smile on his face. While it should be noted that Peter can also slide into domestic abuser territory, with him it’s usually because he’s too stupid to know any better and played for Black Comedy. Jeff, on the other hand, is never presented as anything but a malicious Hate Sink.
  • Charles Yamamoto was a competitive eater who attempted to murder Chris as revenge for Chris beating him in a hotdog eating contest, and murders several other people in the process.
• The Flintstones had a few of these. One James Bond-inspired episode had Fred and Barney the victims of Mistaken Identity and wind up kidnapped by a Mad Scientist named Dr. Sinister. One example of how evil the villain was: in one scene, he ordered a henchman to throw another guy in "the bottomless pit", Fred and Barney being able to do nothing but watch, terrified, as the guy was dragged away, begging for his life. Fred eventually had the nerve to ask who the guy was, to which Dr. Sinister replied, "Oh, just a former assistant."
• Armondo Guitierrez has shades of this role in the early episodes of Freakazoid!. Most of the villains were primarily Sketch Comedy caricatures, providing laughs first and conflict second, but the cliffhanger ending of "The Chip: Part 1", where Guitierrez has Dexter tied to a chair and orders a man with a gun to kill him, is played completely straight and later returns as Freakazoid's fully realized Evil Counterpart and only loses by a fluke. Granted, he still has humor to him with how he unintentionally quote Khan Noonien Singh in his debut, while in the second he gained Freakazoid-like wackiness along with his powers, in particular flipping out whenever Freak calls him a weenie ("DON'T SAY THE WEENIE WORD!").
• Parodied in Futurama during the "Purpleberry Pond" segment in the episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit".
• Gravity Falls has major villains from the start, but both season one Big Bad Lil' Gideon and recurring threat Bill Cipher are within the usual tone of the series. That is not the case for the two villains in "Northwest Mansion Mystery". The Lumberjack's Ghost is an Ax-Crazy vengeful spirit who is willing to condemn an entire party of innocents to a horrible fate as payback for a hundred-years-old betrayal. The true villain of the episode, and the most unambiguously evil character on the show so far, is Preston Northwest, an abusive parent to his daughter Pacifica, and willing to condemn hundreds of people, including most of his closest friends, to a terrifying living death to save his own skin. He even states that his family plans to survive by eating their butler.
  • As of the final arc of the series Bill Cipher certainly qualifies. While his initial appearance had him more of a twisted games master with Blue-and-Orange Morality, once he gains the power he needs, he turns into a villain straight out of the work of Clive Barker, turning the entire town into a twisted hellscape, engaging in casual use of Body Horror and Taken for Granite, and taking great glee in setting horrific monsters upon the innocent townspeople. He's easily evolved into the darkest and most dangerous villain the show has ever seen.
  • There's also the shapeshifter from "Into the Bunker," who is a Thing Expy with absolutely none of the Laughably Evil Black Comedy typical of Bill or even the show in general.
• King of the Hill is a grounded, realistic Slice of Life comedy, but it has its fair share of depraved antagonists:
  • Trip Larson from the Halloween episode "Pigmalion". Not only does he try and transform Luanne into his ideal woman, he tries to kill her with a pork processing machine, and ends up getting himself killed in that same manner.
  • Luanne's mom Leanne is an alcoholic, self-absorbed criminal who neglects Luanne and physically abuses her husband and later Bill. Her foibles are not played for laughs.
  • Mad Dog, Dale's rival from "Soldier of Misfortune," is a scarily competent, brutal, casually amoral Right-Wing Militia Fanatic who speaks in a low, growly voice, has no humorous quirks whatsoever, has been to prison for murder, holds the gun club hostage, and nearly succeeds in killing Dale and his friends.
  • The sorority from "Fun with Jane and Jane" are a disturbingly realistic depiction of a cult. They convince unsuspecting women to join them via emotional manipulation (exploiting Luanne's desire to belong somewhere and Peggy's ego), force members to dress exactly alike and change their names to Jane so as to destroy any sense of individuality they have, slowly break their will through extreme peer pressure and denying them food and bathroom breaks, cuts off all contact between new followers and their loved ones, and eventually sells them into slavery at a jam-and-jelly farm. Luanne and Peggy, among some others, are the only victims shown to escape; the cult has been active for years beforehand, and they remain at large by the end of the episode.
  • Big Willie Lane from "New Cowboy on the Block". At first Hank and the guys are overjoyed to have a former Dallas Cowboys lineman living on the block, but Willie soon proves himself to be an overbearing Small Name, Big Ego Jerkass (whose one major accomplishment in life was blocking one kick) with a penchant for property destruction and lording over the alley with his ex-footballer buddies. If he hadn't been wearing his Super Bowl ring when he slugged Hank near the end of the episode (with Kahn getting a Polaroid picture of the bruise with the imprint of the aforementioned ring, and Dale narrowly absconding with the picture), he would most likely have gotten away with assault as well, since the cops were pretty eager to believe a former NFL player who went to the Super Bowl over Hank about who caused the property damage.
• Even with the lighthearted nature of The Lion Guard , any episode with Scar will always be darker and more serious.
• Some of the oldest Looney Tunes shorts had villains that made even Yosemite Sam look timid:
  • The 1949 Porky Pig cartoon "Bye, Bye Bluebeard" had a Serial Killer (that's right, a serial killer) named Bluebeard who would likely have given most of today's children nightmares. (Forget the fact that he was hideous, stood 6' 11 tall, actually had a long, blue beard, and the most nightmarish Evil Laugh in Looney Tunes history, he nearly decapitated poor Porky using a homemade guillotine; Porky was saved when a mouse (who Porky had been chasing earlier, who decides to flip a coin to decide what to do) tricks Bluebeard into eating some bombs disguised as popovers, causing the villain to explode.
  • Even some of the more recent (relatively speaking) shorts had some darker villains, like the Evil Scientist from "Water Water Every Hare". While his trained monster Rudolph (better known to modern fans as Gossamer) was more Laughably Evil, he himself was true Nightmare Fuel, his attempt to kill Bugs using an axe being a scene that likely startles anyone who sees the cartoon for the first time.
• Megas XLR: The appearance of Evil Coop marks the only time in the show's run were the villain was taken completely seriously. Given he destroyed his dimensions' versions of the Glorft, the S-Force, RECR and even Megas.
• The new Mickey Mouse cartoons, despite being more chaotic and cynical than previous Mickey Mouse cartoons, tend to reamin cheerful and downplay most of their darker elements as Played for Laughs. Not so in the Halloween Special "The Scariest Story Ever: A Mickey Mouse Halloween Spooktacular", where Mickey tells a series of scary stories to try and frighten the local kids. Though most of the characters and villains retain the goofiness of the rest of the series, the final story features Granny, a shockingly sadistic witch who lures children into her home (after potentially tricking them into commiting cannabalism) so she can then kidnap them and turn them into pies. She displayes her evil by showing off the boys squirming as they are baked alive, and by cackling widly as she chases down a boy before capuring him and subjecting him to the same fate as his friends.
• The Mr. Men Show: While the show doesn't really have any genuinely evil characters, the pirate alien captain and his crewmates from "Pirates" attempted to murder (or at least put them in a Fate Worse than Death) Mr. Happy, Mr. Tickle and Mr. Rude by throwing them out into space.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot: The Cluster usually straddles the line between serious and comical, but for purely serious villains there was Armagedroid, a gigantic robot designed to destroy all weapons and almost killed Jenny in its first appearance, and Gigawatt, a towering electricity-eating energy vampire who although a bit quirky, proved to be one of Jenny's most difficult opponents.
• The G1 My Little Pony continuity has a lot of villains who came close to enacting a Sugar Apocalypse.
  • The initial specials have Tirac, a demon-centaur who wanted to turn the ponies into an army of demonic dragons with his "Rainbow of Darkness", and Catrina, a catwoman sorceress who plotted to enslave the ponies into gathering ingredients for her Fantastic Drug of choice, "witchweed potion".
  • The movie has the Smooze, an all-consuming Blob Monster unleashed by a trio of Card Carrying Villains.
  • The series proper has:
    • Squirk, a tyrannical sea monster who wanted to reclaim part of his undersea kingdom by flooding Dream Valley.
    • Crunch the Rock Dog, a huge dog made out of stone that hates all things soft, has the power to turn anything he touches to stone and turn normal rocks into sharp-toothed monsters to stalk his prey. The way he and his rock minions chased after the Bushwoolies, turning them to stone one by one, seems right out of a horror movie.
    • Grogar the ram sorcerer, who captured unicorns by intercepting their teleporting powers, and wanted to banish the main characters to another dimension. He also threatens to do the same to his mooks.
    • King Charlatan, a penguin monarch who wanted to freeze the entire world so that only the strongest and most worthy would survive. He and his soldiers also had a Nazi vibe, referring to creatures unable to survive the cold as "impure".
    • Lavan, a lava demon who unbalances the magic of Pony Land and tries to kill the Princess Ponies and the Ice Orcs on more than one occasion (and like Tirac, is himself killed for it).
    • Erebus, a cloud monster that eats shadows. The characters were forced to send for the Flutter Ponies to stop him.
• The G4 My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic continues the franchise's tradition of cute ponies being menaced by terrifying villains.
  • Discord seems harmless enough, right? Sure, Celestia is on edge, but he's a pleasant fellow and loves playing games. He's also a Reality Warper with a passion for psychological torture, corrupting Twilight's friends into a twisted mirror of their true selves and driving Twilight herself to the brink of the Despair Event Horizon. He celebrates his victory by turning Equestria into a World of Chaos where the ponies are reduced to playthings for his amusement. He's such a nasty piece of work that his Heel–Face Turn a season and a half later came as a genuine shock, and even then it took a temporary Face–Heel Turn, being betrayed just like he betrayed everyone, and Twilight being willing to help him despite what he'd done for it to fully stick.
  • "Hearth's Warming Eve" introduces the Windigos, evil spirits who feed off of hatred and cause deadly blizzards. They drove the original ponies from their homelands, and nearly destroyed Equestria. Moreover, it's implied that they freeze people in a state of hatred but keep them alive so that they can have a continuous food supply.
  • Queen Chrysalis in "A Canterlot Wedding", whose modus operandi is to replace and impersonate individuals, draining their loved ones to increase her own power and put them under Mind Control, before leading her minions in a full scale invasion so they can feed as well and drain everyone. It's implied that Equestria isn't the first land she's done this to. She became one of the most recurring villains on the show and she gets even worse in her later appearances: first it's revealed that love-draining isn't how Changelings are supposed to feed and doing so keeps them hungry forever. Chrysalis knows this, but never told them, all so she could stay in power. She refuses the Changelings' Heel–Race Turn and undergoes major Sanity Slippage alone, before coming back in the final episodes and at one point threatening to rip Spike's wings off. Oh, and her actions in the finale have a hand in bringing back the Windigoes mentioned above, and her response to this? Let them turn Equestria into a frozen wasteland, so that she can eventually destroy them and force its citizens to follow her.
  • "The Crystal Empire" has King Sombra, an evil umbrum who used dark magic to enslave the ponies of the Crystal Empire and make it vanish for a thousand years when Celestia and Luna defeated him and sealed him away. He is never played for comedy at any point, is so feared that the crystal ponies imply that part of their Laser-Guided Amnesia is them intentionally repressing the events of Sombra's rule, and comes within inches of killing a main character — a child no less — before being Killed Off for Real himself, in a first for the show.
    • Made even worse with the tie-in My Little Pony: FIENDship Is Magic issue focusing on him, which reveals he's an Animalistic Abomination — a living embodiment of malevolent shadows that was created to disguise itself as a pony to set its progenitor force/race free from under the Crystal Empire. Perhaps worse is that he's also a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds; he spent his entire life believing he really was a pony, and only embraced his origins when it seemed hopeless that he could ever be anything but what he was destined to be.
    • The show reveals what Sombra would do if he had succeeded in recapturing the Crystal Empire in the episode "The Cutie Re-Mark", in which he creates mind controlling armor to militarize the entire empire and pitch war against Equestria. In the time of his return to when this episode takes place, he would have conquered half of Equestria, which is shown to have gone through an industrial revolution to fight Sombra.
  • Season 4's two part finale brings in a G4 revamp of Tirac as Lord Tirek, the Trope Codifier and the very first of these to appear in the franchise. He escaped from Tartarus, the In-Universe Hell-equivalent and prison for Equestria's absolute worst monsters — to put things in perspective, Discord was merely petrified and kept in Celestia's garden. He has powerful fire magic and he is capable of leeching the magic out of ponies, which includes erasing their cutie mark. He's so terrible that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna feel the only hope they have of bringing him in and re-imprisoning him is to send Discord to capture him. That decision backfires spectacularly when Discord is tricked into siding with Tirek instead. And then he turns on Discord and steals his magic too when he has no more need of him.
  • The second film has the Dazzlings, who were originally Equestrian sirens that were banished to the human world. Ironically, the defeat of Sunset Shimmer by the Humane Six at the end of the first film was what allowed them to rediscover Equestrian magic. Like the Windigos and Changelings, they are Emotion Eaters who feed on the hatred incited in CHS's students by their Magic Music. Once they absorb enough to regain their power, they transform into anthro-pony-siren Dark Magical Girls who can summon frightening avatars of their original forms. They are implied to have been even more powerful back in Equestria.
  • "The Cutie Map" had Starlight Glimmer, a dictator who steals ponies' Cutie Marks and talents and then brainwashes them into believing that only by stamping out individuality and making sure all are "equal" can ponies be friends. Notably, her methods have been compared to those of real-life cults. Much like Discord above, she was such an evil and realistic villain that her Heel–Face Turn in her second appearance came as a genuine shock, particularly after she spent the majority of that second appearance using time travel to prevent Twilight and her friends from ever meeting, and drags Twilight herself along so she can see it happen. They wind up doing this several times, each creating a worse timeline than the last; while Starlight didn't intend this part or even know about it at first, being shown that what she's done will result in Equestria being reduced to a barren wasteland does disturbingly little to dissuade her from this course of action.
  • "Do Princesses Dream Of Magic Sheep" has the Tantabus, a formless nightmare entity created by Luna to punish herself for her actions as Nightmare Moon. Since it gains strength from inflicting anguish onto sleeping ponies, it eventually becomes strong enough to flee from Luna's dreams, needing only for a sleeping pony to dream of some pony else to enter another dream... and did we mention that all it needs to do to turn something into a horror tailor-mad to terrify you is touch it? And then it gains enough strength to tear open a portal which would let it enter the real world, which would let it turn it into an eternal, waking nightmare. Worst part? Unlike the rest of the show's villains, it's implied it might not even be an intelligent being, merely a force of nature, like a hurricane, meaning you can't reason with it, threaten it, or trick it, only fight it.
  • Season 8 has Cozy Glow. A seeming sweet school-age pegasus who is in fact an evil psychopathic mastermind, who conspires with Lord Tirek to drain all the magic in Equestria and trick Twilight and her friends into trapping themselves in Tartarus, and take over their School of Friendship, so ponies will have to turn to her for guidance, and she would rule Equestria as the Empress of Friendship. And unlike every other villainous pony in the show, she notably never gets a Freudian Excuse for her actions, which can be scary for some people or could be taken as proof that some ponies are just born bad — or irredeemably evil, as in her case.
  • The worst of them all is Season 9's Grogar, the Ancient Evil who is responsible for causing all the evil in Equestria. Or he would be, if he weren't just a persona.
• Over the Garden Wall is a Coming of Age Story based around Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers! and is mostly a practitioner of Rousseau Was Right, filled with people who, underneath their problems, genuinely want to help and make things better. The Beast is the reason for the "mostly" disclaimer; a shadow creature who stalks the forest and all in the Unknown fear, he turns lost people into Edelwood trees, preying on those struck with grief or despair, and targets children in particular. In the end he is implied to be Killed Off for Real, albeit offscreen, and it is very much deserved.
• The Owl House is a mostly light-hearted Horror Comedy, with even the villains getting in on the humor or having significant redeeming qualities. Emperor Belos doesn't. As it turns out, he's a Witch Hunter and a Puritanical Fundamentalist Christian zealot named Philip Wittebane who is on the Boiling Isles for one reason and one reason only. The total genocide of any and all Witches and Demons. Over the centuries, he has gaslit the entire population into believing his propaganda, to get them to accept Coven Sigils which will actually be used to drain them of all magic, thus killing them. He also once had a brother named Caleb who fell in love with a Witch. Philip killed him in cold blood, and has been making and killing clones of Caleb for centuries to the point that he has killed his own brother hundreds of times over. He gets briefly defeated by the Collector, by manner of getting smashed to paste against a wall. This doesn't kill him. He piggybacks on Hunter, the latest Grimwalker and later assimilates him before he manages to escape to the Demon Realm to finish his Crusade. The way in which he ultimately tries to finish the job? Taking control of the entire Boiling Isles Titan to consume it and everyone on it. To top it all off, while possessing the Titan, Belos successfully murders Luz herself even if it doesn't stick, and the show thoroughly establishes that this man is absolute, pure evil.
• The Patrick Star Show: While the rest of the Shmandorians are pretty goofy, Sarge from "The Wrath of Shmandor" is completely serious. He is the only one to not lose sight of his goal of taking Patrick down, and his last-ditch attempt after his army is defeated is to go into Patrick's brain and mind control him. He orders everyone in Shmandor to go and attack Patrick, which is not played for laughs. Even after Squidina finds a peaceful solution, it's shown that Sarge survived and is still controlling Patrick's brain.
• Dr. Blowhole in The Penguins of Madagascar. In his debut episode he planned on flooding the world just because of all the embarrassment humans put him through when he was a circus dolphin. And in his second appearance, he intentionally meant to drown Skipper when he gave him amnesia. After his debut, some of the other episodes went into Darker and Edgier territory.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • The unnamed Drill Sergeant Nasty in "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", especially in contrast to the usual Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. He spends the entire episode coldly and sadistically pounding out any creativity and happiness from the duo to the point they essentially become mindless drones. He even dies in the end. He's also a literal nightmare, so the show can get away with this.
  • The crossover with Marvel presented Red Skull. His evil plan was to destroy the Tri-State Area, and he modified one of Doofenshmirtz's inventions to drain matter and living energy from other superheroes.
  • The bald mad scientist Aloyse Von Roddenstein, especially in the special "Phineas and Ferb Save Summer". He started out as a childish rival to the show's Big Bad Heinz Doofenshmirtz during the series, but it wasn't until the "Save Summer" special, that he finally reveals his true maniacal plan to take over the Earth by sending it into a new Ice Age based on one of Doofenshmirtz's successful schemes, something that even Doofenshmirtz is horrified to learn about.
  • The Movie gives us an Alternate Universe version of Doofenshmirtz who is far more successful—and far more cruel—than the Doof we know. He has successfully taken over his Tri-State Area for his family and turned it into a totalitarian dystopia where everyone lives in fear. Plus he's turned his old enemy Perry the Platypus into a mind-controlled cybernetic "platyborg"—a condition which turns out to be permanent, even after the brainwashing is lifted—and has no qualms about doing the same to Phineas.
    • The episode sequel gives us an Alternate Universe version of Doofenshmirtz's ex-wife Charlene, who is still married to the alternate Doof and is just as cruel and intelligent as him. As it turns out, she had used her husband's technology to turn 25 more animal agents into cyborgs to help enforce her family's rule over their Tri-State Area. She even helped staged a fake divorce with the alternate Doof to satisfy their family's safety and finances in case their reign would be overthrown.
  • The Faux Affably Evil Mittington Random in "The Klimpaloon Ultimatum" only appears in one episode but he definitely qualifies as this due to his intentions to experiment on the titular Klimpaloon to make a perfect new brand of old fashioned swimwear. This wouldn't be too bad for the show, if the episode didn't show off his deformed failed attempts and mention how his experiments will ultimately kill the cryptid. Also not helping were his claims that he'll rip Klimpaloon apart stitch by stitch if he has to.
  • Rodrigo from "Minor Monogram", as he planned to split up the entire Tri-State Area into two, that will ultimately kill thousands of people (including Doofenshmirtz and Perry).
  • Liam McCracken from "Primal Perry", as he planned to turn both Perry the Platypus and Doofenshmirtz into trophies (due to his severe hatred toward platypuses and having a reputation of going rogue).
  • In Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe Super Super Big Doctor comes off as someone relatable to Candace into to be revealed to be a cruel tyrant who enslaved a planet with a mind control plant, imprisoned her younger brothers, and only wanted Candace to continue to restore said plant to life.
• The obscure cartoon Piggsburg Pigs! is a slightly surprising inclusion to this list. As the name suggests the show's about a town of anthromorphic pigs right out of your standard Saturday morning fare. It does have a pair of bumbling wolves who are always trying and failing to eat the protagonists, but every episode ends up being about the Forbidden Zone on the edge of town. Which is crawling with evil undead and mad scientists who like to whip up evil monsters in their gothic castles....
• Pound Puppies (1980s), a series about cute puppies, had Captain Slaughter who felt very out of place among the other cartoony characters. He was some sort of sea captain whose face was perpetually hidden by shadows and whose only visible features were red eyes; he also was extremely tall, dead serious, had a metallic claw hand and spoke with Peter Cullen's deep voice. Unsurprisingly he was phased out of the show, since the writers didn't know what to do with him (and also because Cullen no longer was available to voice him).
• While all the villains The Powerpuff Girls are either a Generic Doomsday Villain, a complete jerkass, or too much of a joke to be seen as a threat, these villains stand out from the rest:
  • HIM, compared to the rest of the show's Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain cast, had a much more disturbing presence (even noted frequently by the cast and the narrator) and frequently supplied Mind Rape or other much deadlier tactics of bringing the girls to an end. Granted he also often supplied Nightmare Retardant and did have the occasional bumbling or comedic role (he was a Sissy Villain after all and one of the most daring villains on a Cartoon Network comedy ever;) but he was still miles deadlier than most of the Rogues Gallery, especially when he was the villain of the episode, in which none of the scenes with him were Played for Laughs ^note if he wasn't the villain, he was just as comical as the other villains. And then there's the episode "Speed Demon" where he turned Townsville into a living hell on Earth when the girls accidentally traveled forward in time. One exception is Season 4's "Him Diddle Riddle" in which if the girls don't solve all his riddles in time, Professer Utonium would have to pay for breakfast. And the 2016 reboot's HIM is no slacker. Just as diabolical, deadly, and twice as inconspicuous with his ploys as before.
  • Excluding their appearance in the Clip Show episode, the Rowdyruff Boys are treated as very serious threats that only increase once the aformentioned HIM removes the weaknesses to cooties and made them stronger upon ressurecting them.
  • The Gnome, besides being another serious villain, is the series most powerful and frigteningly competent villain, as he was able to successfully manipulate and defeat the girls and his plan to turn Townsville into his own utopia was a success before killing himself after realizing the errors of his ways. He's also the only character who's able to defeat HIM of all villains with complete ease.
  • Dick Hardly is the only villain to have no sympathetic or (overtly) comedic traits whatsoever. He's also notably one of the villains that came the closest to killing The Powerpuff Girls and would've succeeded if Professor Utonium didn't arrive in time. Fittingly, he's the only antagonist to die.
• Puppy in My Pocket: Adventures in Pocketville has notably devious villains despite being an overly-saturated Sugar Bowl with Precious Puppies and Cute Kittens.
  • Eva may be one of those cats, but she is an absolutely devious and cruel antagonist who despises everyone around her, including her own lackeys (on occasion she threatens to hurt them if they don’t successfully carry them out) and especially her sister Princess Ava. She often concocts certain plans to take the Friendship Heart and rule the Pocket Kingdom with an iron paw, making sure her sister does not return. In “Operation: Princess”, showing a flashback of her and Ava’s, it is even implied that she attempted to kill or paralyze Ava by prying a rather large tree branch that was over Ava loose, but she managed to be quick enough to only get her paw injured.
  • The Pet Buster is even worse. He abuses pets in his care and sells them in auctions for fortunes, and even makes a pact with Eva that if he helps her with keeping Ava hostage, she’ll let him have all the pets he wants. He even won’t hesitate to hurt animals (such as Wallace, twice) or even a child like Kate.
• The Real Ghostbusters:
  • While the show was usually light-hearted in nature, there were many episodes featuring a ghost that was truly sinister, serious, and far more lethal than most threats the boys in gray faced. Notable examples include the Boogieman, who scared the living daylights out of children For the Evulz, and the Grundel, whose M.O. was corrupting kids to transform them into members of his own kind. One example that really stands out, though, is Mee-Krah from the episode "Standing Room Only". The episode in question was from one of the Lighter and Softer later seasons, but Mee-Krah was an Eldritch Abomination that sought to devour every ghost it could find and had caused an alarming swath of destruction before the Ghostbusters succeeded in destroying it.
  • There's also an In-Universe example in the episode "Who're You Calling Two-Dimensional": Winchester Wolf, was a cartoon villain and nemesis for Dopey Dog, both characters created by cartoonist Walt Fleishman (a homage to Walt Disney and Max and Dave Fleischer). Evil, black suit, brooches and belt buckles shaped like skulls here and there, a cape, godlike powers and voiced by Frank Welker.
• Rainbow Brite, as the name implies, is a happy, colorful show, and it’s normal villains, Murky Dismal and Lurky, are definitely not that threatening, though they had a few moments of vileness. Being harmless did not apply to two other villains, though:
  • The two part episode "The Beginning of Rainbowland" had the original being who ruled Rainbowland, the King of Shadows. Nothing about him was played for laughs, and from what interactions he had with Murky and Lurky, it was clear he kept them in line with fear. He also used a baby for a hostage, which proved to be his undoing when the baby proved to be the thing Rainbow Brite was searching for that allowed her to destroy him once and for all, causing him to become the only villain to actually die.
  • The movie and the final episode of the series, "Queen of the Sprites" had the Dark Princess, a truly evil and sadistic woman who only sought to obtain power and wealth. Her appearances were also not played for laughs, and she came very close to defeating Rainbow Brite both times.
• Megabyte and Hexadecimal from Reboot are incredibly serious characters that are stuck in a show that at least started much more lighthearted. They're capable of levity, including Megabyte getting into a guitar duel with Bob at Enzo's birthday, but Megabyte's Magnificent Bastard personality and Hexadecimal's Split Personality almost always pushed the heroes to their limits in between the more comical "game survival" episodes. The show later became much more serious and the two were simply allowed to do real damage instead of just be intimidating.
• Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: While Rise is generally considered Denser and Wackier than its predecessors, this show's version of The Shredder is arguably the most terrifying take on the character yet. This time, being a demonic set of armor, The Shredder is a horrifying, nigh-unstoppable monster whose only goal is to eradicate everything in his path; with the heroes barely surviving each encounter with him. It's telling that the show takes a darker turn the second he's merely mentioned. And he only gets scarier once he regains his sapience in The Finale.
• While Robotboy is an overall lighthearted series and the villains are Laughably Evil. Protoboy is an exception. He’s Robotboy's older brother made by Professor Moshimo in his youth, who was kidnapped and reprogrammed by Dr. Kamikazi to help him rule the world, but made him too evil for him to control. He is taken disturbingly seriously and his often truely heinous acts are almost never Played for Laughs, things like giving a brutal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Robotboy, repeatedly trying to kill him and Moshimo, apparently strangling Tommy with his shirt, trying to manipulate Robotboy and Robotgirl to sacrifice themselves to save Moshimo, only to plan to kill them all instead, and attempted mass murder. It is telling what the writers wanted people to think of him, since most of the episodes Protoboy appears in end with him being seemingly dead.
• Rose Petal Place, a 1980s toy franchise in the Strawberry Shortcake mold, yielded two animated specials—and the antagonist, the spider woman Nastina, lives up to her name and tries to kill the heroines at least five times over the course of the specials, interrupting a musical number to try and crush them with a birdbath, trying to flood the garden by breaking a dam, locking Rose Petal in a room with no light so she'll die, trying to catapult a heavy rock onto everyone, and trying to run everyone over with a lawn mower.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated is definitely Darker and Edgier than any other Scooby-Doo incarnation, but is still child-friendly, making the truly nasty villains all the more shocking:
  • The Freak of Crystal Cove blackmailed the original mystery gang into leaving town and took the baby of one of them hostage, raising it for 18 years and threatening to harm him if they ever came back. Professor Pericles murdered Ed Machine, and the Gang's friend Cassidy Williams, and later experiments with genes to create a mutant army of cattle that cause wide property damage and killed at least 29 people. He later puts mutated cobra venom into his former master's spine so he can induce terrible pain if he disobeys him.
  • The Entity that the Myth Arc leads up to is an Eldritch Abomination played 100% straight, complete with a Leaking Can of Evil that twists and corrupts the lives of everyone in Crystal Cove for centuries. In the Grand Finale, "Come Undone", it's released and proceeds to eat the entire town, threatening to devour galaxies once it's powerful enough, and is only stopped by a literal Cosmic Retcon.
• Sheriff Callie's Wild West has at least three examples:
  • In "The Train Bandits", the titular villains have no problem with sending the train's passenger cars towards a broken bridge, spelling certain doom for the passengers.
  • All of the villains in the book The Cat Who Tamed the West are this - one of them even steals Callie's horse, Sparky.
  • In "Boots or Consequences," Mean McGee, who states that he steals whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and doesn't "give a baked bean" if it makes someone cry.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Shadow Weaver, Catra, and Hordak are impressively dark for a show where at least two episodes feature the day being saved by rainbows and friendship.
  • Shadow Weaver is an Abusive Parent in two different ways, using emotional manipulation on Adora while outright torturing Catra, and even when she switches sides, 1) she's not shown to be any better of a person, just one with a grudge against Hordak, and 2) she escaped by cruelly playing on Catra's desperate need for emotional validation.
  • As for Catra, while she has a sympathetic backstory, her spiral out of control leads her to lash out in such cruel and short-sighted ways that it's almost uncomfortable to watch, for all that it invariably rebounds on her.
  • Hordak has a sympathetic backstory and a love interest, but he's still a tyrant with no moral qualms about conquest, torture, or war crimes.
  • Horde Prime is worse that Catra, Shadow Weaver, and Hordak combined. He has conquered entire galaxies, cultivated a clone army that he treats like worthless tools, and ruthlessly stamped out the free will of his clones. With only a few minutes of screen time in "Destiny, Part 2", he establishes himself as the most cruel, callous, ungrateful, and depraved character in the series.
• The Smurfs (1981):
  • Gargamel, sometimes, only other times he was too Laughably Evil or too much of an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
  • Nemesis, a warlock who was introduced late in the series, had the goal of gaining immortality by stealing the Smurfs' Long Life Stone, and an accident in the past had made his face so hideous that most people couldn't bear to look at him. His skills in black magic were greater than Gargamel could ever fathom.
  • Gargamel's godfather Lord Balthazar, a far more competent wizard. The show's Never Say "Die" policy was severely compromised in his first appearance, when he used a gun (he didn't refer to it as such, but it was clearly a blunderbuss of some sort) against the Smurfs, killing their pet duck. (He later got better, due to Swiss-Army Tears.) Balthazar mellowed a great deal in future episodes where he really didn't really care about the Smurfs at all, but his plots to predict the future often made him a dangerous threat.
  • The Wicked Witch Chlorhydris, who was so full of hate that she wanted to make the entire world feel the same way, eradicating everyone's ability to feel happiness and love. While such goals are not uncommon for villains in a series like this, Chlorhydris did some downright sadistic things in pursuit of it, like kidnapping the wood elf Laconia and using her wand to kill the flowing plants in the forest - not caring in the least that doing so was causing Laconia to die an agonizingly slow death as she felt their pain. She even went so far as to curse her own daughter Priscilla into an ugly hag just to spite her happiness. (Unlike most villains in the series, Chlorhydris was given a backstory; apparently, she was once in love with a wizard who left her at the altar, and apparently, the heartbreak was enough for her to want to deny all of creation what she had once had.)
• Sofia the First , being a Disney Junior show, has its villains either be very comical, have strong freudian excuses, or are otherwise harmless in the grand scheme of things. The series finale gives us Vor, one of the most dangerous villains in the series. Once she's freed from her locket, she ends up possessing Prisma (a more sympathetic villain) to do her bidding, actively tries to murder Sofia, resorts to using a mind control spell to get people to do her bidding, and plans to take over Enchancia and eventually Neverland. Let's just say her death is so satisfying.
• Sonic Boom: While the cast is written to be more comedic than their mainstream counterparts, the show does nothing to make light of their versions of Shadow and Metal Sonic.
  • This version of Shadow is far nastier than his canon counterpart. Being much more competent and serious than Eggman, Shadow is a ruthless jerkass capable of beating down the entirety of Team Sonic and willing to have the entire universe destroyed just because Eggman tricked him. Notably, his beatdown was so painful that everyone except for Sonic was left on the ground in pain (and not the Amusing Injuries kind the show is known for) and is treated dead seriously.
  • Metal Sonic is an even straighter example. While Shadow at least had some moments where he was The Comically Serious, Metal Sonic is played dead seriously in both of his appearances. He's very easily the most credible threat the cast has ever faced, being able to utterly dominate both Sonic and Shadow in combat at the same time and is just barely defeated through the combined efforts of Team Sonic.
• Zigzagged in Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM); the show is not especially Saccharine as, despite its Funny Animal protagonists, it's presented as a very bleak world. But, prior depictions of Mobius had been the cutesy, brightly colored videogames, and the somewhat bizarre but still mostly happy Mobius of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. In those worlds, Big Bad Dr. Robotnik was a goofy, bumbling idiot, who actually looked fairly cute and harmless in the games. In this show? Dr. Robotnik, voiced by Jim Cummings, is an ugly, twisted, heartless Knight of Cerebus, established from the outset as ruthless, cold, spiteful, malicious — and worst of all, competent. Every battle against him was a legitimate struggle, and it's made quite clear that all of the bleakness and ugliness in Mobius stems from his cold, black heart. The zagging came in the second season, when Robotnik was made considerably more goofy and comedic, which took most of the sting out of him. He was set to become replaced by a new vile villain, Ixis Naugus, but the show got cancelled before this could happen.
• Squirrel Boy was a mainly down-to-earth comedy about a boy and his talking pet squirrel, and their most constant adversaries were the local mean kid and his pet parrot. However, two episodes featured Archie, a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing Hair-Raising Hare who in his first appearance was initially polite and affable to the Johnsons as part of a plot to rob them of everything they owned, and at the episode's climax was very clearly poised to murder Rodney for getting in the way. By his second appearance, he's undergone Sanity Slippage while in prison and wants to take revenge on Rodney by compressing him into a cube and shoving him into a miniature replica of Archie's cell so he can experience the claustrophobia and isolation that Archie felt.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil has Toffee of Septarsis, a Lizard Man totally at odds with the series around him. He's a planner, a manipulator, someone who has been fighting Star's family for several generations. However, thanks to his intelligence, he's able to do all sorts of things to get things his way. In his last appearance in season 1, he gets Star's wand destroyed after threatening Marco's life. And while he seems to die...he survives in a piece of Star's Wand. And when he returns in season 2, it pulls a Grand Theft Me on Ludo's body and then causes the defeat of the Magic High Commission, 4 of the most powerful magic users in all dimensions. Crafty, ruthless, and ultimately as strong in body as in mind, Toffee is the most vile thing in Star Vs., and easily her greatest threat.
• Steven Universe has most of its threats turn out to be either mindless monsters or Homeworld Gems that can be reasoned with and calmed down. But this doesn't mean said characters don't enter the show as menacing threats where fighting does seem like the only good option.
  • Jasper is a ruthless, Darwinian Blood Knight who marks as the show's first major Knight of Cerebus and introduction to Homeworld beyond Peridot. Notable as the first Gem Steven immediately knew he couldn't reason with, Jasper introduces herself by casually ordering Peridot to use their ship's cannon to vaporize the heroes, brutally destabilizing Garnet and headbutting Steven into unconsciousness. In all her appearances, Jasper is consistently treated as an intimidating and domineering threat to everyone and everything around her who only respects those of equal or greater strength.
  • Jasper is matched in ruthlessness by a figure who is ironically at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of appearance. Aquamarine is tiny, cute and child-like, with an adorable British accent. She's also completely unhesitant to use Steven's captured human friends as hostages, and her huge ego and condescending attitude make her that much easier to hate. However, she does Pet the Dog by promising not to punish Topaz's insubordination.
  • The Diamond Authority stands out as the biggest example of this. Beyond being responsible for overseeing Homeworld's atrocities (from a war that led to hundreds of casualties, to forced fusion experiments of shattered gems, to the production of a tortured superweapon made out of millions of these gem shards), on their own record, they are incredibly petty and willing to murder anyone they perceive as insulting them. Yellow Diamond in particular is engineering the Cluster - the aforementioned superweapon - not out of any pragmatic purpose, but instead to obliterate Earth out of vengeful spite, and Blue Diamond is a confirmed Gem shatterer. And finally we have White Diamond, who is an utterly deluded, narcissistic sociopath who has the power to strip a Gem of their individuality and turn them into essentially sockpuppets for her, complete with a monochrome coloring and her voice coming out of their mouths. And she's also a master at psychological torment even without using this power!
    • Averted with Pink Diamond, who if anything is the Big Good. Sort of. Details revealed over the course of the series show that, while Pink/Rose may have ended up as the very picture of all that is good- and may have even lived up to it- she started as the Diamonds bratty teenage daughter with a Hair-Trigger Temper and powers that made her even more of a Person of Mass Destruction than the other Diamonds. She was already starting to succumb to the cycle of abuse, and was only saved because she came to Earth and Humans Are Special. Even so, she didn't truly grow out of it until almost the present, as she poofed fellow Crystal Gem Bismuth when a disagreement caused them to come to blows, then hid Bismuth's gem away for thousands of years without telling the others what happened. It's shown even more clearly in the movie, where we see that Pink abandoned her (up to that point) best friend by ordering her, using the Diamonds' More than Mind Control powers, to stand perfectly still in their space garden while Pink went gallivanting off to have her own colony. Poor Spinel suffered a psychotic break when she learned Pink never even intended to come back, and became the villain of the movie.
  • And then there's the aforementioned villain of The Movie, Spinel. She arrives on Earth, sings a song, and promptly poofs all the Crystal Gems in about ten seconds. She then tries to do the same to Steven, but her weapon doesn't physically hurt him because he's a Half-Human Hybrid. She taunts him and laughs when Steven poofs her, because she already knows he can't stop her Doomsday Device which will kill all organic life on the planet. We later find out that Spinel only cares about killing and hurting Steven, but she hates him to the point that she's willing to destroy an entire species out of spite. In fact, when pushed during the climax, Spinel utters one of the most chilling lines of the entire series:
    Spinel: You know, I came here to take my anger out on a bunch of strangers. But now that I know you? I want to KILL you even more.
• Strawberry Shortcake's most famous adversary, the Peculiar Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak, qualifies as this in the first of the 1980s specials, The World of Strawberry Shortcake. When his Berry Birds fail to plunder her strawberry patch, he masquerades as a friendly old peddler and sells the kids a watering can that never runs dry to give her as a birthday present. The trick is that he's the only one who knows how to stop its flow. Strawberryland ends up completely flooded in a Sugar Apocalypse. The poor kids end up harvesting all the strawberries and transporting them to the Pieman's castle in exchange for his making the waters recede (leaving a muddy wallow behind). To make matters worse, the kids lose track of the baby of the group, Apple Dumplin', in the process and she ends up in the palace as well. At this point the Narrator, Mr. Sun, pulls a Deus ex Machina and offers to grant Strawberry a wish, which she uses to summon an army of living trees — which bring the castle down, forcing the Pieman to surrender. The kids actually induce a Heel–Face Turn in him once he's returned the berries and the baby, but he reverts to his old ways by the time of the next special, whereupon he's more of a Harmless Villain with extremely petty, childish motives and any real damage his plans pose to others is often an unintended side effect of his plotting.
• The DiC Entertainment Animated Adaptation of Sylvanian Families into a Western Animation series delves into this. While the original toyline and Japanese OVAs were set in a pure Sugar Bowl, the DiC cartoon added very hostile and frightening villains Gatorpossum and Packbat.
• Tangled: The Series has Zhan Tiri, who is by far the most vile, sadistic, and twisted villain in the entire franchise. Her crimes in the past consisted of transforming into a blizzard in an attempt to freeze everyone in Corona to death, and corrupting the Great Tree and using its powers to kill anyone who opposed her. During the events of the series, she took on the form of the "Enchanted Girl" and manipulated Cassandra into betraying Rapunzel and releasing her from her prison. Zhan Tiri influenced Cassandra to commit several horrible crimes, and after she obtained the Sundrop and Moonstone, she used her new powers to attempt to slowly murder everyone in Corona.
• The 2012 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) is considered the Lighter and Softer version of the 2003 version as there is plenty of humor around. However, there are some villains in this show that make it actually seem like it could be the darkest in the series:
  • The Shredder himself is definitely this. In contrast to his 1987 version, the 2012 Shredder is much more evil, stronger, and dangerous than even his 2003 version. Shredder as had many people painfully mutated in order to serve his cause, forced his own daughter Karai who is not his real daughter, she's Hamato Yoshi's child to have a worm planted in her head forcing her to fight by his side, and don't even get us started on the lengths he will take in order to get back at Splinter. One of his plans even involved having Splinter's four sons turned into snakes and brutally kill him. At one point Shredder actually killed Splinter, chosing revenge over stopping Earth from being sucked into the black hole, even saying it was Worth It as he finally killed his rival. And then there is when he is mutated into the Super Shredder where Shredder completely loses the last bit of sanity he had and was hell bent on killing anyone and everyone, actually managing to kill Splinter for good this time in a rather brutal fashion. It's very easy to say that Shredder is definitely the most evil villain of the show.
  • The Rat King for sure counts as one considering, next to Shredder/Super Shredder, he is the scariest and most sadistic villain in the entire show. Unlike most other villains who are comedic and have their moments (even Shredder has some The Comically Serious moments), the Rat King has no comedic moments whatsoever. The Rat King's methods include taking over New York with his army of rats and killing off every human, and he's so scary and so much of a threat that even Splinter is scared shitless of him. As revealed in season 4, the Rat King actually died from his fight with Splinter. However, despite being dead, there are hallucinations of him that still frighten Splinter. His appearance is similar to a Grim Reaper doesn't help in the slightest.
  • The Triceratons considering what their plans are. Even though they are against the Kraang and are trying to stop them, the Triceratons are no saints themselves. They are willing to destroy entire planets just to stop the Kraang from spreading (including Earth). Even though they are in the right that the Kraang must be stopped before they spread to other planets, the Triceratons still had many innocent people killed when Earth was sucked into a black hole, making them have the highest kill count of any villain ever. It doesn't help they threatened to destroyed the entire solar system as well...
  • Both of them, however, are small potatoes compared to Kavaxas. Kavaxes is an extremely powerful being known as a Demodragon that served as the Big Bad for the first arc of season 5. Like the Rat King, Kavaxes is never played for laughs and all of his actions seen are extremely evil, like stealing the souls of people and killing them onscreen. It doesn't help he's pretty much unkillable since he is a being from a different realm and his supernatural powers makes him immune to pretty much anything the heroes can throw at him. Kavaxes' only weakness is an artifact known as the Seal of the Ancients that whoever is in possession of it, Kavaxes will obey whoever as the seal to no objection. This was how Tiger Claw was able to keep him under control. However, when the seal got broken, Kavaxes proceeded to release the full potential of his powers and attempted to take over the entire planet.
• Teen Titans Go!
  • While most of the show's antagonists are barely a threat and treated as jokes, the daughter of Slade, Rose Wilson, stands out as a genuinely ruthless villain. Not only is she the only villain who's managed to emotionally break the Titans, but she was able to effortlessly curb stomp all of them, even coming close to straight-up killing them. While she does have her snarky moments, the show makes no light of the fact that she's a sociopath more than willing to potentially kill innocents without any remorse, a line not even the Titans cross on their bad days. And unlike the rest of the show's villains, these actions aren't played for laughs.
  • There's also Blackfire. While she was just a Big Sister Bully who attempted to change her ways in her debut episode, her reappearance in "Girls' Night In" removes all of her sympathetic traits and portrays her as an Omnicidal Maniac attempting to destroy the Earth who's more than capable of single-handedly giving the Girls' Night group a beatdown. And unlike Rose, Blackfire no longer has any comedic traits to speak of.
• Teen Titans (2003) sometimes has this trope. The show itself is usually lighthearted, and most of the one-shot villains are comical (with a couple of notable exceptions)- but lets take a look at some of the Big Bads. Slade is a creepily emotionless diabolical mastermind who runs on blackmail, Mind Rape, Hannibal Lectures, and delivers No Holds Barred Beatdowns to several characters in surprisingly vivid fashion. Then there's Trigon, who's Satan and wants to use the show's main Woobie, who's also his daughter, to bring about The End of the World as We Know It- and he actually succeeds in causing Hell on Earth for two episodes. Fun times. Both villains (as well as Brother Blood) were toned down a lot for the cartoon. For much of the '80s, the Teen Titans was one of DC's darkest books. The fact that they were able to make it a kids' show is a feat for the ages.
• Similiar, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo has titular 13 Ghosts (sometimes called demons). While some of them are goofy, few are quite nasty. Maldor the Malevolent, first ghost they fought, was a menacing dark sorcerer, attempted to kill the gang with magic, imprisoned and threatened a wizard to get magic wand that would let him conquer the world and trapped Daphne in magic sleep Scooby barely managed to break. Time Slime was outright sadistic, even for ghosts' standards, and managed to terrify Scooby so much he got Heroic BSoD and only broke from it when Vincent showed him vision of the future in which Time Slime turned world into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, corrupted Flim Flam and Scrappy and drove Shaggy and Daphne insane. Nekara is a Femme Fatale, who makes wizards fall in love with her and then drains their magic powers, as she almost did to Vincent. Rankor actually looks like classic demon and, in order to prove himself worthy of joining a group of ghosts trying to destroy the world, turned Vincent into stone, attempted to kill the gang as well as some plane passengers.
• Thomas & Friends may feature cartoonish talking trains, but even this kind of world has its demons.
  • While a few of them do play nice, most of the diesel engines in the series are very vocal about their desire to overtake the steam engines and aren't above trying to hurry that day along. At least twice, they've tried to smelt down other engines and escaped any consequences.
    • This particularly applies to the first time twins 'Arry and Bert appear. These two are in charge of the island's scrapyard, which itself is a very horrifying place. When an engine named Stepney gets lost and winds up in the scrapyard, as his crew leaves to find help, the two diesels pull up to him and force him into a smelting factory, leaving him there to be scrapped while they flee and are never held accountable for their actions. Granted, the two later suffer Villain Decay and outright help the engines several times, but it was still one of the most terrifying moments in the show.
  • For the first Big Damn Movie, the writers drafted the character of P.T. Boomer. Bad-mannered, very impolite, and willing to bully his way into getting what he wants, Boomer does nothing but make everyone's life an absolute misery, and his petty nature would've made him just a simple jerkass if it wasn't for his penchant for using DYNAMITE. While Boomer was ultimately dropped from the final film and replaced with the more comedic but still threatening Diesel 10, leaked deleted scenes featuring the character show that he was indeed a nasty piece of work.
  • During the franchise's 70th anniversary in 2015, the series received Sodor's Legend of the Lost Treasure, a Darker and Edgier addition to the series catalog. The main villain for this was the human character Sailor John. While he seems like a typical Cool Old Guy, John would prove himself to be one of the worst characters in the series in terms of morality; not only was he greedily entitled and selfish, but he constantly abused his one underling and was quick to threaten others if they get in his way, and he will not hesitate to harm innocents to achieve his goals. Combined with a nasty temper and a penchant for using dynamite, Sailor John is the vilest character ever to exist in the world of Sodor, and the fact that he made it to the final cut unlike P.T. Boomer only reinforces his status as the franchise's most threatening villain.
• While Timon & Pumbaa is usually more lighthearted and goofy than the movie it's based on, it has its fair share of villains who prove to be quite deadly and dangerous foes, with most of them having very few, if any, comedic traits.
  • Cheetata and Cheetato are close to this. While they are both smug snakes, they prove themselves to be dangerous predators, as they hunt and intimidate their victims in their unique sophisticated style, with a heavy implication that they have eaten many animals during the three months the hyenas were gone. They also have the benefit of having baritone voices.
  • The natives could also count. The leader is shown to be devious and hostile, from demanding that Timon be thrown into a volcano to throwing Timon and Pumbaa into a bottomless pit, where it takes weeks to land and is inhabited by an monstrous beast who initially tries to eat them. His three henchmen may be more dense and can be easily fooled, but they aren't any less competent. They are shown kidnapping Pumbaa and nearly making him their meal as well as attempting to kill Pumbaa in order to remove his tusks, showing that they are just as hostile, aggressive, and ruthless as their leader.
  • Quint sometimes falls into this depending on the job he has. The best example being in "French Fried", where he is an Evil Chef trying to cook Timon and Pumbaa's new snail friend Speedy. During Timon and Pumbaa's attempts to rescue Speedy, Quint tries to kill them by throwing various sharp objects at them and also locks Timon inside a freezer so that the meerkat can freeze to death.
  • The jeweler/butterfly collector is quite malevolent and creepily overzealous. He is shown to not care about the lives of insects, as he kidnaps Speedy the Snail to make an earring out of his shell for his wife and kidnaps butterflies to put them in a collection, both of which he succeeds in doing while the insects are still alive. When he finds out Timon and Pumbaa freed the butterflies, he threatens to put them in a collection until the butterflies come to their rescue.
  • Little Jimmy. Initially, he passes himself off as a cute and innocent bluebird hatchling, but not long after his introduction, he reveals himself to be a deadly and dangerous criminal mastermind who threatens Timon's life if he does not build him a house, let alone reveal his true nature to Pumbaa. He also holds Timon hostage as the police try to catch him. When he gets turned in by Timon and Pumbaa, he pretends to be Mr. Bear's friend in order to get revenge on the duo. After getting Timon and Pumbaa arrested by framing them into breaking the law, he takes advantage of Mr. Bear's aggressive nature by tricking him into thinking Timon and Pumbaa hurt him, knowing that he will murder the duo for what they supposedly did to his "new friend".
  • Mr. Bear is an Anti-Villain example. While he is genuinely a Nice Guy and sometimes shows compassion for Timon and Pumbaa, he still has a terrible temper and gets annoyed very easily to the point where he is willing to hurt or even kill anyone who gets on his bad side. He demonstrates this by breaking and damaging large objects, such as trees, mailboxes, statues, and even metal gates. He also goes as far as eating two children for playing with fire, as well as breaking into Timon and Pumbaa's new fast food restaurant to attack them for not giving him his order.
  • The mummy beetle from "Guatemala Malarkey" is a great threat to anyone who enters his temple. While Timon and Pumbaa journey inside the temple, the mummy beetle attempts to kill them in numerous ways, all while stalking them, hiding behind the walls, and pretending to be a statue.
  • The jackal from "Congo on Like This" is a tricky, clever, and sinister predator. He is implied to have eaten countless animals, as Timon and Pumbaa find a carcass in the middle of the jungle and his cave being filled with carcasses. He has spent months trying to get Timon and Pumbaa away from Simba, with his final attempt being to disguise himself as a tarsier and trick Timon into thinking that Simba is about to eat him and Pumbaa. When he leads Timon and Pumbaa into his cave, he reveals his true nature and comes close to eating the duo until Simba comes to their rescue.
  • Mr. Pirebat from "Jamaica Mistake?" is, as Pumbaa puts it, a nefarious, bloodthirsty vampire bat. He has his bat assistant Enos lead the victim into their house, where he pretends to be a gracious dinner host so that he can fatten the victim and suck their blood at midnight. He actually succeeds in sucking Timon and Pumbaa's bloods, as they are revealed at the end to have become vampire bats and as they fly off in search for blood, Mr. Pirebat's evil laugh is heard in the background.
  • "Oahu Wahoo" has Bahuka, a Terrifying Tiki who speaks telepathically so that only Timon can understand him. He is quite deadly, vengeful and demanding, putting very little value in life. If Timon is to even question his obedience to Bahuka, he threatens his life and the stability of the island in which they stand. When Timon betrays Bahuka by throwing him into the volcano after he demanded the meerkat by throwing in "the pillow" (Pumbaa), he nearly kills Timon and Pumbaa by wiping out an entire island.
  • The cobra from "Once Upon a Timon" is shown to be clever, cunning, and a quite dangerous threat to Timon's former colony. It kidnaps Princess Tatiana and takes her to its lava pit, where it holds her captive and attempts to eat her. During Timon and Pumbaa's attempt to rescue Tatiana, it comes very close to eating the two meerkats until Pumbaa saves them, leaving it to accidentally fall into the lava.
• Tiny Toon Adventures:
  • Dr. Gene Splicer from "Hare Raising Night" is described as being a certified looney who performs deranged animal mutation experiments in his very first scene, proven when three guinea pigs cower in fear as he takes one of them away, presumably to perform a heinous experiment on before the camera cuts to static. Things get worse when Buster and his friends arrive at his laboratory to rescue the captive animals (under the false impression that Buster was taking them to the Emmy awards), as he takes Plucky away for his brain, is extremely abusive to his creation Melvin, tries to mutate Buster and his friends near the end of the episode, and then falls into his own vat of mutation goo.
  • Silas Wonder from "Sawdust and Toonsil" is a Repulsive Ringmaster who captures rare and exotic animals, and is shown to horribly mistreat them (practically poaching them) and extort them for profit. He is also the only Tiny Toons villain to get Killed Off for Real, as at the end of the episode, his train falls off a cliff, and the resulting crash sends him to Heck, where The Devil treats him the same way he treated the animals.
  • Mr. Hitcher from "How I Spent My Vacation" is a parody of Jason Voorhees and John Ryder, and he spends much of the movie trying to kill Plucky, Buster, and Babs. The sequence where he chases the latter two has him swing his chainsaw wildly about as he tears the mine apart with it, causing it to collapse. He even does it with a really deranged look on his face.
• Transformers: Animated is notable for making the Decepticons far more dangerous than in other versions of the franchise, given the lighthearted tone of the rest of the show.
  • Megatron takes the cake, as the mere mention of his name can cause a collective Oh, Crap! from the Autobots.
  • Shockwave murdered Blurr in an incredibly horrifying manner, and Wasp is in a continuity where his insanity isn't played for laughs and is completely terrifying for it.
    • Let's make this a little worse, by issuing a clarification and a correction. Clarification: He killed Blurr by crushing him into a small cube. Correction: That didn't actually kill him.
  • Lockdown is a freelance assassin Transformer who's caused Ratchet to have war flashbacks. His whole body is a Swiss-Army Weapon whose left arm and leg don't match his right. Why? He butchers other Transformers for their parts to increase his power, or just to keep as trophies.
  • Prometheus Black/Meltdown is a rare human example in the series. While the other human villains are deliberately used as filler and to exemplify the Decepticons as a greater threat, Meltdown manages to be genuinely depraved and terrifying. Case in point — in his second appearance, he was experimenting on humans to try and create human transformers (he'd already done at least two adult humans, one of them his former lawyer, and was planning to use 8-year-old Sari Sumdac as his next test subject).
• VeggieTales: While this children's cartoon about talking produce teaching about God and the Bible normally strays away from darker plots and villains, a few stand out:
  • Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen!: Haman is the xenophobic right-hand to the king, and seeks to send an entire family to what is considered a Fate Worse than Death just because one of them refused to bow down before him.
  • Larry-Boy and the Bad Apple: The titular Bad Apple desires to destroy Bumblyburg's sources of leadership, communication, and protection by trapping Mayor Blueberry, news anchor Petunia Rubarb, and superhero Larry-Boy in virtual manifestations of their greatest desires, which gradually become more tempting (and in Petunia's case, deadly) the longer they stay there. She holds one of her bladed limbs to her henchmen's throat when he mentions splitting the glory, and then tries to lure and trap every citizen of the town into a funhouse they cannot ever leave. When Larry-Boy comes to stop her, she simply decides to roll the funhouse and crush everything, not even stopping when she sees a mother and baby in her path.
• Not even Wallace & Gromit is safe from this trope:
  • In A Matter of Loaf and Death, Piella Bakewell seems to be a sweet-natured woman whom Wallace falls in love with. Behind the sweetness, though, she's actually a ruthless serial killer who has already killed 12 bakers and plans on killing Wallace next, all because she was dropped by a baking company when she got too fat to ride their hot air balloon. The short opens with her killing someone onscreen, presented from her own POV.
  • Victor Quartermaine in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. He starts off just being a shallow, greedy jerk after Lady Tottington's wealth and jealous of Wallace (who also has feelings for Tottington) and Wallace and Gromit's humane rabbit catching service. However, when he finds out the secret of the eponymous were-rabbit (specifically that Wallace and the were-rabbit are one and the same), he uses this revelation as an excuse to murder Wallace in order to get Wallace out of the way of his affections for Tottington and get glory from the town.
• Lord Dominator from season 2 of Wander over Yonder was deliberately crafted as this, with Word of God stating they wanted to try having a season with an overarching plot. She's a sadistic, genocidal maniac who takes pleasure in destruction, is the first villain in the show to actually kill off a character for real, and succeeds in destroying every single planet in the entire galaxy except for one. All her evil actions are played with uncommon seriousness, and she easily curb stomps every other villain in the galaxy, save Hater. And had the show continued, we would have seen someone even worse than her show up.
  What if Wander’s weird little galaxy was our weird little show? And what if Dominator represented all the extremely perilous, high-stakes, big mystery storytelling that some of our favorite shows have? Heck, she’s even forcing our silly Cartoon guys into a season long serialized arc! Does zany Cartoon silliness even have a right to exist in the face of unspeakable odds?
• Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa has Skull Duggery, the skeletal ghost of a greedy miner who died in a cave-in while trying to retrieve his hidden fortune of silver. It's especially notable in his second appearance "Skull Duggery Rides Again", where he teams up with two other ghosts in a plan to raze Cowtown.
• Miss Power from WordGirl. Magnitudes more powerful than every other villain and WordGirl herself, and much more intelligent. Pretends to be a hero and trains WordGirl while slowly corrupting her and the citizens. When WordGirl finds out she's being played, Miss Power simply beats her up and takes over anyway. And given the nature of her powers, she's pretty much the embodiment of bullying.
• Winnie the Pooh:
  • The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh episode "Cleanliness Is Next to Impossible": a creature named Crud (voiced by Jim Cummings using his Robotnik voice from the Sonic the Hedgehog SATAM show) imprisons Pooh, Piglet, and Tigger and then tries to force Christopher Robin to help him make the rest of the world dirty by saying "If you don't, YOU'LL NEVER SEE YOUR FRIENDS AGAIN!". Granted, by normal standards this hammy cartoon blob is not much worse or creepier than most Disney Afternoon villains, but he's much more so than you'd expect from one of Disney's lightest and softest universes.
  • Prior to New Adventures, the inclusion of any villains period was completely new to the franchise, which usually didn't have any antagonists (par maybe Rabbit, which still isn't saying much). For example this was the first depiction to show real Heffalumps and Woozles. Granted they were all comical and almost as hapless as Pooh himself, but were still a big change from the usually laid-back stories of A. A. Milne's creation.
• Yin Yang Yo!:
  • While The Night Master still retains comedic features, he is a really dangerous and intimidating villain compared to the Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains usually faced by the heroes. He was responsible for the Woo-Foo extinguish, killing all the Woo-Foo's knights, Master Yo being the only survivor.
  • Nightmooster from "Deja Fu", an alternative-future version of Ultimoose who gained Night Master's powers. He has the honor of having killed Yin and Master Yo on screen!